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Breast MRI Case 10

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For this one, I'm going to show you,

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first of all, two images on PowerPoint.

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And that's these two.

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And the history on this lady is that she's a 46-year-old

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high risk patient who has a personal history of breast cancer.

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And so, let's just show you that for one moment.

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And then I'm going to go across.

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And this is right breast on the right here.

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Let's go back and look at our images.

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And what I have here on the left is a gadolinium-enhanced image.

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What I've got here on the right,

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which is sort of the most important image here, is a subtraction image.

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And so, I'm just going to go through that.

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Okay, let's see the quiz.

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All right, let's see the answer to that.

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So we've got normal variant, post radiation effect, and diffuse DCIS.

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So that's kind of our differential.

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So what we're looking at here is really,

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and I think the MIPS are really the most of it.

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I always start with looking at the gadolinium subtraction MIPS.

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I find they sort of, you know,

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in some patients, that's basically all you need to look at and you're done.

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But they really are very helpful

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at looking at globally symmetries between the two breasts.

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And you can see here that her left breast

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really has a very little background,

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background parenchymal enhancement at all,

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where the right breast has significantly more,

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and probably classified as being moderate background parenchymal enhancement.

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And in this case, the reason is that the left breast was previously irradiated.

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And when that's happened, once the acute post-radiation changes have gone,

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that tends to quell down, the background of parenchymal enhancement.

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But these can be challenging.

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You've got to correlate it very carefully with the history.

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You also need to look for a history

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of hormone replacement therapy,

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and hormone replacement therapy.

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Not hormone replacement therapy,

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hormone suppressant therapy,

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with one of the estrogen antagonists

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such as Tamoxifen or oxidase inhibitors.

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The reason you need to know about those is

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they will suppress this background parenchymal enhancement.

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But when you come off them, you can have a flare-up.

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And so, you can have a patient who, one year, has fairly low background activity

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and then the next year, you've suddenly got diffuse activity.

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And obviously, your question is always,

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in these patients, you know,

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could this be diffuse DCIS?

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In this patient, we felt that these foci was scattered enough.

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They all look very similar,

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but we were happy just calling that asymmetric background enhancement.

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But I can tell you that we have been caught out.

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Just as an incidental finding in this lady,

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kind of coming back to our first case,

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she does have bilateral inverted nipples,

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which you're seeing here on the right.

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And then, just there,

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you saw it on the left.

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So just another example of bilateral nipple enhancement.

Report

Faculty

Petra J Lewis, MBBS

Professor of Radiology and OBGYN

Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center & Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth

Tags

MRI

Implants

Breast

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